Results tagged pine nuts from David Lebovitz

When I was in Sicily, either it slipped my mind, or my mind is slipping, because for one evening, I was supposed to be responsible for making something for dessert. I was offered a number of beautiful things to cook or bake with, and my mind kept wandering back to the heavenly ricotta cheese that we’d seen being made earlier that day.

Since we brought home a few big strainers of the just-set ricotta, I couldn’t resist putting one to use in ice cream. I blended up the cheese with some milk, a few spoonfuls of local honey, and made a luxurious pine nut brittle to crumble into the ice cream, called a croccante. I figured, “Heck, we’re in Sicily. I’m dumping a whole bunch of pine nuts into ice cream. Whee! Here I go…!”, assuming they were not so expensive there.

My gracious hostess didn’t say anything, but I didn’t realize until later that I used what was probably the equivalent of the monthly mortgage on the house to mix into my single batch of ice cream. Fortunately everyone ate every last spoonful of ice cream, so they didn’t go to waste. (Whew!) But when I got home, I decided when I shared to recipe, to take an easier…and less-costly…route.

Sicilian gelato is traditionally made with milk and no eggs, but I decided to go with cream when I got home because the ice cream would become very hard to scoop otherwise. (After the recipe, I give guidelines to make the version I made without eggs, although I recommend using half-and-half or cream for a better texture.) Gelaterias get around that problem by storing their ice cream in freezers that aren’t as cold as home freezers, so the ice cream is scoopable.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was talking to someone at the airport, just after my arrival in Israel, who had asked me what I was doing in her country.

When I told her I was there to learn about the cuisine – by eating it, her eyes lit up, and she said – “Whenever I leave Israel, after my family, the thing I miss the most is the food.” And after one week, I could see why. I was missing it, too, the moment I stepped off the plane and returned home. In fact, my home kitchen has become a mini hummus factory, churning out batch-after-batch of hummus. And it lasts just about as fast as I can scoop it onto pita bread.

It’s funny because whenever I come to New York, people always tell me about far-flung places that I, now a slightly bewildered tourist in this city, have barely heard of. (Although I seem to be pretty good at finding every TJ Maxx and Bed, Bath, and Beyond.)

When people say, “You must go to Williamsburg!” – I look at them funny, wondering why they are suggesting I head to a colonial in Virginia for dinner where folks are dressed in traditional garb. Red Hook was a place where many people only went one-way, in the boot of a Town Car. And bad things happened to people on streets in Manhattan whose name contained a letter…at least according to my mother.

I’ve gotten with the lingo a bit so I don’t look like a hick when people tell me about all these places, but no one ever talks about Staten Island.

I’m one of those people that really craves bitter greens. And France is a funny place because on one hand, radicchio (trevise), frisée, arugula, and Belgian endive are found easily. The more sturdy greens – like kale and broccoli rabe, are frequently absent, although I did recently hear an Italian vendor at the market explaining to a baffled patron what broccoli raab was. He told her it was “…the foie gras of Portugal”, which wasn’t quite how I would phrase it, but I admired how he customized his sales technique appropriate to his clientele.

When I was in Nice a few months ago with my friends Adam and Matt, I wanted to show them some of the more unusual local specialties, ones you wouldn’t come across unless you were actually in a certain region. French cooking is very regional, which is why you won’t find bouillabaisse in Paris or all that many macarons in Nice. And a lot of people visiting a certain town or city might not be familiar with some of the more unusual things that are only available there, like Socca or Panisses, simply because no one would think about eating them outside of the area where they originated.

In case you’re wondering, you can’t make a Tourte de blettes without Swiss chard (blettes). For one thing, if you did, then it wouldn’t be Swiss chard tart. So get that notion out of your head right now. And believe me, if you can’t find chard, I feel your pain. One fine morning at the market, I bought my big, beautiful bunch of chard from a big pile at the market to make this tart.

When I started this site, I had forums, where people could chat and post messages. Before we took it down (because my brain was about to implode), one of the burning questions on there was this: Is couscous pasta?

My contention was that it wasn’t, since it wasn’t a ‘paste’ (or as the French would say, un pâte), which is what I believe—in my limited intelligence—that pasta is.

On the other hand, perhaps it is pasta, because couscous is flour mixed with water, then rolled until little granules form. Theoretically, then, it is a paste before it’s broken down into little bits. Which makes me wonder if kig ha farz is pasta, too? (Although back then, no one would have know what that was, so it wouldn’t have bolstered my argument.)

Then, to make matters even more complicated, there’s Israeli couscous, whose springy, chewy texture wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if someone called it pasta.